Many once held as industry innovators and lions in their arenas are now falling like dominos, and their dismissals are finally shifting the terrain of acceptable business conduct between women and men. Prominent media figure Mark Halperin is the most recent to lose not only his latest book deal from Time but also a lucrative series with HBO based on his political writings. Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective just cut ties with another prominent male based on news that surfaced about prior allegations of sexual misconduct. Amazon Studios’ Roy Price just had to resign under the same allegations. And the list will only continue to grow after the wide-spread news of film executive Harvey Weinstein’s decades long sexual harassment of countless women.

Some short time after the 2016 election, I had a conversation with a friend about the impact of social media on Trump’s win. I was wrestling with the role of what I thought was an inherently neutral marketplace of ideas in promoting Trump, the larger issues of Russian propaganda and interference in the election, and the general problem of abuse.

“We can’t put too much faith in technology,” my friend said. “Technology is more like magic than science.”

Today, even the most casual conversations now contain a deep infusion of socio-political perspective and, often times, heated passion. People previously uninterested politics and social issues are now reading POLITICO and The Hill right alongside their favorite business, beauty and sports publications. This information flow is then wildly accelerated by the digital echo-chambers of various tech platforms that then absorbs the collective thought, mashes it up, promotes it, deconstructs it, and creates a veritable never-ending cycle of exchange between a variety of new and effervescent subcultures and voices on the current state of the United States. Diversity. Immigration. Sexual harassment. Racism. Climate Change. No one is safe, and anyone or thing can become the day’s hottest digital target in a flash.

No matter your party affiliation, it’s hard to ignore the increasing social upheaval and corresponding activism, driven in part by our political moment but undergirded by the bigger trends of globalization, automation, and a historic distrust in our public institutions.

Public life is in crisis. And when public institutions fail, it affects all us, especially the most vulnerable.

So why are so many of you, many with incredible influence over our everyday lives, sitting on the sidelines?

In so-called “normal” years, many companies use the Super Bowl to create a halo effect around their brands, taking advantage of the massive audience to talk about our common values. (See: Proctor & Gamble’s #LikeAGirl, among other recent examples.)

A Syrian brain surgeon and two women in Chicago unite to stop a humanitarian disaster.

This past weekend, I stood outside Terminal 5 at O'Hare, protesting along with thousands of other Chicagoans the treatment of Muslim immigrants and refugees by the current administration. As we enter a dark stretch in this country's treatment of refugees, I wanted to get a first-hand account of someone who's been an advocate of those fleeing Syria, and how she used online media to shine a spotlight on the tragedy.

Wendy Widom is a two-time Emmy-award winning social media manager at CBS 2-Chicago, and the co-founder of #StandWithAleppo, the highly visible online advocacy campaign. Wendy and I have been exchanging messages about her experience. Read more below.

If you’re like me, the past month has caused a bit of an existential crisis — and made you fired up and ready to do something.

But if you’ve never been involved in the kinds of fights you’re interested in, it can seem overwhelming. I’ve had many conversations over the past few weeks with well-intentioned people who see big problems and a big, intimidating white space before them in terms of where to start.

One of the things I loved about being a history major in college was getting to step back and look at the big picture. The study of history shows you how things — people, communities, religions, leaders, ideas — interact and influence each other. It made me appreciate that everything is connected, but it also showed me that if you pay attention, patterns emerge. “History repeats itself” is a trope that has a certain truth to it.

In mid-October, not long after Donald Trump drew attention for his 3 a.m. tweets, I received an email from Hillary Clinton’s campaign inviting me to help canvass voters in Iowa, a short drive from my home in Chicago. The message noted that “1,500 of Hillary’s best supporters” had headed to neighboring states the weekend before, and now they wanted me to do the same.

I have an ache, right now, in the top left corner of my right calf. It’s a specific pain, like if my calf muscles were a rowing crew, and one rower got a migraine in the middle of a race. Everything still works, but that one guy isn’t very happy about how his team needs him to keep going.

It's because of people like you who have stepped up—in ways big and small—that progress over the past few years has been possible. And as we roll into the final months of President Obama's last term in office, it's going to be up to folks like you to help make sure we aren't held back by those trying to stop progress.

2014 was a year of automation failures. Oreo had an auto-reply slip up. The New England Patriots had to apologize for accidentally tweeting a racial slur. Facebook stirred up memories that people would like to forget.

I didn’t want to be the one to write a post like this. But my brain was about to explode.

I got into the social media industry shortly after getting my MBA, because I saw the incredible disconnect between what we talked about in business school and what was happening in the real world. The old ways of thinking about business, not just marketing or PR, were changing.

A little while ago, I was walking along the beach with my three-year-old son when he ran straight into the water. It was March, so the water was easily 50 degrees or colder, but that didn’t matter. He’s always been fearless in areas where his father tends to be kind of wimpy.

I was having a conversation with a friend recently about what it’s like to be a parent. He has older children, so he’s a little ahead of the game compared to me. We were talking about how difficult it is to make the transition into parenthood — how it’s such a big lifestyle change; how suddenly you have this little human who is completely dependent on you for every need, physically and emotionally.

I recently saw an adorable video by Red Balloon, an English-language school in Brazil. The students say what they want to be when they grow up, and the school makes them official business cards for their chosen profession – even if it happens to be “Dinosaur Hunter.”

Imagine if we were all given this degree of creative freedom from such a young age.